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Founder and CEO, The Empowerment Plan, Detroit

Photo by Nathan Skid / Crain's Detroit Business
Veronika Scott, founder and CEO of The Empowerment Plan in Detroit, is a 2013 Crain's 20 in their 20s honoree.

Why she lives in metro Detroit: "It's collaboration or die. We need to collaborate; we need to work with as many different people as we can to bring up the whole city. That mentality is very unique."

Claim to fame: Started The Empowerment Plan, which hires women out of shelters to make coats.

Next step: Launching a for-profit company built around a one-for-one model in which customers can buy a coat for themselves and fund a coat for someone in need.

It took one of the people whom Veronika Scott was trying to help to show her a unique way to make a difference.

Scott was in the research phase of a project for a product design class at Detroit's College for Creative Studies that was becoming more than a class project. She had been visiting shelters to find out how best to design a coat for some of Detroit's more than 20,000 homeless.

One of the women at a shelter where she was doing research told her what she needed to hear -- "your coat doesn't matter."

What mattered then and now, Scott says, is job creation.

"At the end of the day, people gravitate to the coats because it's easy to understand, but the uniqueness in what we do is who we hire," Scott said. "That woman really changed the whole direction."

The Empowerment Plan became a nonprofit organization in December 2011 when Scott finished school, and it now hires women from shelters as seamstresses. Scott has a staff of 14.

In 2012, the nonprofit handed out more than 1,000 coats to people in need, and Scott said it plans to hand out 4,000 coats nationwide through other nonprofits.

The project is aided by companies such as General Motors Co. and Carhartt Inc., which donate materials for coats.

The nonprofit saw $250,000 in donations last year, and has a goal of $700,000 this year.

"I never in my wildest imagination and dreams ever expected it to become like this," Scott said.